Everything about Chateau Fontainebleau totally explained
The
Royal Château of Fontainebleau (in the
Seine-et-Marne département) is one of the largest French royal
châteaux. The château as it's today is the work of many French monarchs, building on a structure of
Francis I. The building is ranged round a series of courts. The city of
Fontainebleau has grown up around the remainder of the
Forest of Fontainebleau, a former royal hunting park.
The chateau introduced to
France the Italian
Mannerist style in interior decoration and in
gardens, and transformed them in the translation. The French Mannerist style of interior decoration of the 16th century is known as the "Fontainebleau style": it combined sculpture, metalwork, painting, stucco and woodwork, and outdoors introduced the patterned garden
parterre. The Fontainebleau style combined allegorical paintings in moulded plasterwork where the framing was treated as if it were leather or paper, slashed and rolled into scrolls and combined with
arabesques and
grotesques. Fontainbleau ideals of female beauty are Mannerist: a small neat head on a long neck, exaggeratedly long torso and limbs, small high breasts—almost a return to Late Gothic beauties. The new works at Fontainebleau were recorded in refined and detailed engravings that circulated among connoisseurs and artists. Through the engravings by the "
School of Fontainebleau" this new style was transmitted to other northern European centres,
Antwerp especially, and Germany, and eventually London.
History
Louis VII, for whom
Thomas Becket consecrated the chapel. Fontainebleau was a favourite residence of
Philip Augustus and
Louis IX. The creator of the present edifice was
Francis I, under whom the architect
Gilles le Breton erected most of the buildings of the
Cour Ovale, including the
Porte Dorée, its southern entrance. The king also invited the architect
Sebastiano Serlio to France, and
Leonardo da Vinci. The Gallery of Francis I, with its frescoes framed in stucco by
Rosso Fiorentino, carried out between 1522 and 1540, was the first great decorated gallery built in
France. Broadly speaking, at Fontainebleau the Renaissance was introduced to France. The Salle des Fêtes, in the reign of
Henri II, was decorated by the Italian Mannerist painters,
Francesco Primaticcio and
Niccolò dell'Abbate.
Benvenuto Cellini's "Nymph of Fontainebleau", commissioned for the château, is at the
Louvre.
Another campaign of extensive construction was undertaken by
King Henri II and
Catherine de' Medici, who commissioned architects
Philibert Delorme and
Jean Bullant. To the Fontainebleau of François I and Henri II,
King Henri IV added the court that carries his name, the
Cour des Princes, with the adjoining
Galerie de Diane de Poitiers and the
Galerie des Cerfs, used as a library. A "second school of Fontainebleau" decorators, less ambitious and original than the first, evolved from these additional projects. Henri IV pierced the wooded park with a 1200m canal (which can be fished today) and ordered the planting of pines, elms and fruit trees. The park stretches of an area more than 80 hectares, encosed by walls and pierced rectilinear paths. Henri IV's gardener,
Claude Mollet, trained at
Château d'Anet, laid out patterned parterres. Three hundred years later the
château had fallen into disrepair; during the
French Revolution many of the original furnishings were sold, in the long Revolutionary sales of the contents of all the royal châteaux, intended as a way of raising money for the nation and ensuring that the Bourbons couldn't return to their comforts. Nevertheless, within a decade Emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte, began to transform the Château de Fontainebleau into a symbol of his grandeur, as an alternative to empty
Versailles, with its Bourbon connotations. At Fontainebleau Napoleon bade farewell to his Old Guard and went into exile in 1814. With modifications of the château's structure, including the cobblestone entrance wide enough for his carriage, Napoleon helped make the château the place that visitors see today. Fontainebleau was the setting of the
Second Empire court of his nephew
Napoleon III.
Philip the Fair,
Henry III and
Louis XIII were all born in the palace, and the first of these kings died there.
Christina of Sweden lived there for years, following her abdication in 1654. In 1685 Fontainebleau saw the signing of the
Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the
Edict of Nantes (1598). Royal guests of the Bourbon kings were housed at Fontainebleau:
Peter the Great of Russia and
Christian VII of Denmark, and so, under Napoleon was
Pope Pius VII — in 1804 when he came to consecrate the emperor Napoleon, and in 1812–1814, when he was Napoleon's prisoner.
Today part of the château is home to the
Écoles d'Art Américaines, a school of art, architecture, and music for students from the
United States. Preserved on the grounds is Henry IV's
jeu de paume (
real tennis court). It is the largest such court in the world, and one of the few publicly owned.
Jazz pianist and
composer Tadd Dameron wrote the composition "Fontainebleau" upon visiting the palace.
Further Information
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